is
venerable predecessor, in stanzas which express the most delicate, and
at the same time the most generous homage. I scarcely know where to
look for a more graceful dedication in verse. It is said that Goethe
never acknowledged the compliment,--an omission which some German
authors attribute to the latter's distaste at being surpassed on his
latest and (at that time) favorite field. No one familiar with Goethe's
life and works will accept this conjecture.

It is quite impossible to translate this poem literally, in the original
metre: the rhymes are exclusively feminine. I am aware that I shall
shock ears familiar with the original by substituting masculine rhymes
in the two stanzas which I present; but there is really no alternative.

"Would you taste
Purest East,
Hence depart, and seek the selfsame man
Who our West
Gave the best
Wine that ever flowed from Poet's can:
When the Western flavors ended,
He the Orient's vintage spended,--
Yonder dreams he on his own divan!

"Sunset-red
Goethe led
Star to be of all the sunset-land:
Now the higher
Morning-fire
Makes him lord of all the morning-land!
Where the two, together turning,
Meet, the rounded heaven is burning
Rosy-bright in one celestial brand!"

I have not the original edition of the "Oriental Roses," but I believe
the volume contained the greater portion of Rueckert's marvellous
"Ghazels." Count Platen, it is true, had preceded him by one year, but
his adaptation of the Persian metre to German poetry--light and graceful
and melodious as he succeeded in making it--falls far short of Rueckert's
infinite richness and skill. One of the latter's "Ghazels" contains
twenty-six variations of the same rhyme, yet so subtly managed, so
colored with the finest reflected tints of Eastern rhetoric and fancy,
that the immense art implied in its construction is nowhere unpleasantly
apparent. In fact, one dare not say that these poems are _all_ art. In
the Oriental measures the poet found the garment which best fitted his
own mind. We are not to infer that he did not move joyously, and, after
a time, easily, within the limitations which, to most authors, would
have been intolerable fetters.

In 1826 appeared his translation of the _Makamat_ of Hariri. The old
silk-merchant of Bosrah never could have anticipated such an
immortality. The word _Makamat_ means "sessions," (probably the Italian
_conv